Reply #79: "Demons running the ER" is absolutely [View All]

[liberalhistorian]

correct. The first, main and only concern of the vast majority of ER's I've been to is insurance or method of payment. You could be dying or bleeding to death right in front of them, and they'd still ask what insurance you have, or how you intend to pay if you don't have it. I've seen and experienced it far too many times.

And hospitals are now in the top five of the most aggressive industries when it comes to collections, taking the assets of even the poorest patients, slapping liens on houses then filing for foreclosure, etc., etc., even requesting "body attachments" for unpaid hospital bills, which means you're actually arrested and jailed for failure to pay. The Wall Street Journal, of all papers, had an excellent expose of this a couple of years ago. And this is happening in even the so-called "non-profit" hospitals, and it's predominantly against those without insurance since hospitals charge them far more than insureds for the same services.

I LOVE dealing with medical debt collectrolls over the phone. I'm a paralegal who knows the Fair Debt Collection Act and the Fair Credit Reporting Act up and down, inside and out, and I know my rights and what they can and cannot do. They don't like dealing with people who actually know their rights, that's for damn sure. I love fucking with them when they threaten to do something that I damn well know they cannot do. I asked one of them one time, when they started lecturing me on the "irresponsibility of not paying medical providers" if I should have just stayed at home and died of the pneumonia I was diagnosed with after a trip to the emergency room? I had insurance at the time and the bill was still astronomical.

For a four hour stay in the ER, it was several thousand dollars, of which my insurance paid about $2,500. How the collectroll expected me to immediately come up with the other three thousand when it was more than my entire monthly income at the time, I don't fucking know. Then again, I'm not a bloodsucking vulture living off the misery and misfortune of others like they are. I told them my insurance had damn well paid enough and that I simply didn't have the rest.

When she started to get huffy and started in on the "irresponsibility" bullshit again, I asked again if it would have been better if I had just stayed at home, continued to cough up pieces of my lungs, and died of pneumonia, even though I was the single mother of a young son. I've had to run interference for my parents with the damned collectrolls, especially medical ones, as well; I enjoy every minute of it because my parents are far more bothered and scared by them than I am and they prey off of that. Fucking slime motherfuckers, every last one of them.

Don't even get me started on this, my pet subject, or I'll never get off the computer, lol!